Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Applications you can run in a cross-cloud configuration between Azure & Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) include : - E-Business Suite - JD Edwards EnterpriseOne - PeopleSoft - Oracle Retail applications - Oracle Hyperion Financial Management *  AZ-500 Exam Study Guide * Unified data analytics is a concept that combines data engineering, data science and business intelligence. Databricks Unified Analytics Platform is composed of: 1) A collaborative data science workspace with BI integrations 2) A unified data service for high quality data storage and performance 3) An enterprise cloud service for a secure and scalable infrastructure. The Databricks Runtime is a data processing engine built on a highly optimized version of Apache Spark by the original creators of Apache Spark. * Microsoft encourages customers currently using or evaluating Machine Learning Studio (classic) to try Azure Machine Learning designer (preview) , which p...

The easy way to get movie scripts and lyrics of songs is to get them straight from the internet through websites dedicated offering them. If a transcript is not available as the movie is new or it does not have a large audience or the quality of the English or desired language subtitles of a foreign language movie isn't up to the mark, here is a way to get it yourself. There are a good number of streaming sites now that provide better subtitles (especially for foreign language moves) than just auto-generated captions to differentiate their premium offerings. Using the Network tab of browser Developer Tools, get the subtitles file while the movie is playing. While there are a variety of subtitle file formats such as srt, stl, scc, ass, ssa, xml, ttml, qt, txt, vtt, dfxp, smi, csv, sub, rt, sbv, the most commonly used file formats preferred by streaming sites have vtt or ttml in the file extension. Once you get hold of the transcript, you'll notice that it has a lot of...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Bastion service enables you to securely and seamlessly RDP & SSH to your VMs in Azure virtual network, without the need of public IP on the VM, directly from the Azure portal, and without the need of any additional client/agent or any piece of software. Once you provision an Azure Bastion service in your virtual network, the seamless RDP/SSH experience is available to all your VMs in the same virtual network. * Azure ML Designer - No-code machine learning solution that is part of Azure ML Studio * Azure Machine Learning Algorithm Cheat Sheet helps you choose the right algorithm from the designer for a predictive analytics model -  http://aka.ms/AlgorithmCheatSheet *  Data Migration Assistant assesses databases for readiness to move to Azure and recommends target SKUs. Database Migration Service migrates databases to Azure at scale. SQL Server Migration Assistant assesses and migrates databases from other database management systems to...

I download and keep Azure reference guides and whitepapers that Microsoft offers occasionally. While reading about Azure Site Recovery in  Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide , I was intrigued about this point  - Ensure that you create your Recovery Services vault in the same subscription where the Azure VMs are running. You cannot replicate VMs running in one subscription to another subscription. I liked this alert about a ASR limitation as discovering this while in implementation mode would be disappointing if I ran into this scenario. While searching online for any other detail about ASR, I was stumped to read this in the Azure documentation, Common questions: Azure-to-Azure disaster recovery  (04/29/2019): ...you can replicate Azure VMs to a different subscription within the same Azure AD tenant. I checked to see when the Guide was written. It was from 2018. It reaffirmed a fact I learnt the hard way in the past -  if there is information t...

Joe Previte (@jsjoeio) asked on Twitter : Random question for y'all Imagine this scenario. 1. You're online (mobile or desktop) 2. You see something that looks interesting (link to something) 3. You don't have time to read/watch now, but want to do it later. What do you do? (i.e. what's your system?) Going by the 1000+ answers, many people struggle to manage the internet information overload while others use a variety of apps & browser extensions. Rather than depend on a new app only to bookmark, I like how some folks are re-purposing Whatsapp for bookmarking by sending links to themselves. As I already have a Google Account, I have been using Google Bookmarks bookmarklet to add notes while I bookmark my favorite articles - Google Chrome has an option to directly bookmark in the browser & sync them across your devices while signed-in, I like the Google Bookmarks service better as the Notes and Labels option help me to annotate & categorize the l...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Spot VMs provide access to unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts. Spot pricing is available on single VMs in addition to VM scale sets (VMSS). This enables you to deploy a broader variety of workloads on Azure while enjoying access to discounted pricing compared to pay-as-you-go rates. Spot VMs offer the same characteristics as a pay-as-you-go virtual machine, the differences being pricing and evictions. Spot VMs can be evicted at any time if Azure needs capacity. Low-priority VMs will be deprecated *  GCP Preemptible Instances  are not covered by any Service Level Agreement * AWS Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. * Within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the allowable VCN sizerange is /16 to /30. * Mirantis, a Cloud consulting company focused on Kubernetes and OpenStack, acquired Docker Enterprise in November 2019. * Salt is an open-source project created by SaltStack that...

IFTTT or If This Then That is a free web based service that allows you to connect to cloud services and Internet-enabled devices to create useful automated actions without writing any code. When IFTTT launched in 2010, Applets were called Recipes. Following the popularity of IFTTT, there have been other Integration platforms as a Service (IPaaS) like Zapier and Azure Logic Apps. IFTTT  Applets can help your apps and devices work together to do specific things they couldn't do otherwise. For example, an applet may send an e-mail message if a user tweets using a hashtag, or copy a photo on Facebook to a user's archive if someone tags a user in a photo. IFTTT can let you integrate other services with your DIY projects. You can create Applets that work with any app that can make or receive a web request. For a hobby project, I figured a way to submit values from a form on my static website to Google Sheets via IFTTT Maker Service. Rather than store the va...

This Week I Learned - *  Container support in Azure Cognitive Services allows developers to use parts of a subset of Azure Cognitive Services APIs that are available in Azure *  For agent-based migration, Azure Migrate appliance is not mandatory. It is only required if you want server assessment before migration. * In the last three years, Cognizant has moved from being a Niche Player to Challenger and now Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, Worldwide 2020 * A subtype of AI, deep neural networks or DNNs can identify important lesions missed by gastroenterologists during endoscopy and colonoscopy. Deep learning and other forms of AI have also been applied to predict clinical outcomes from electronic health records (EHRs), promote patient safety using machine-vision monitoring, process massive datasets from genome sequencing, provide immediate patient-generated data feedback and synthesize notes from patie...

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform was launched in late 2016. The first form factor in OCI was the Bare Metal shape ( a template that determines the number of CPUs, amount of memory, and other resources allocated to a newly created instance ). Oracle Cloud Infrastructure differentiators  - Technical  * Performance - Off-box network virtualization - virtualization is no longer committed into the hypervisor, all the storage and network I/O virtualization is now engineered into the network outside the physical box using custom silicon cards. - Bare Metal + Local NVMe storage  - All SSD storage - No Network, CPU or Memory over-subscription * Battle tested (NetSuite and other SaaS apps run on OCI) * DB Options - BM, VM, Exadata, RAC * Enterprise Apps support (EBS, JDE..) Business  * Aggressive and predictable pricing — cheaper than AWS * Industry's unique SLAs on Performance, Management and Availability whereas most of the other cloud providers...

By default, a new Sheet doesn't have Locale set to India. As a result any date added to a cell may not appear in the dd/mm/yyyy format with standard Indian style format of day followed by month. To fix this issue, I found this tip in the Google Docs Forums useful. In Google Sheets, choose File > Spreadsheet settings and then change Locale to India - In the spreadsheet where the Indian date format has to be applied select the cell or column and apply custom Date format for India. Selecting Format from the menu, then choose the following options from Number > More Formats > More date and time formats . Apply the format (or a similar variation) as shown below -

This Week I Learned - * Azure is the first public cloud to offer virtualization infrastructure for confidential computing that uses hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs). Even cloud administrators and datacenter operators with physical access to the servers cannot access TEE-protected data.  Azure DCsv2 confidential computing virtual machines run on servers that implement Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX). Because Intel SGX hardware protects your data and keeps it encrypted while the CPU is processing it, even the operating system and hypervisor cannot access it, nor can anyone with physical access to the server. By combining the scalability of the cloud and ability to encrypt data while in use, new scenarios are possible now in Azure, like confidential multi-party computation where different organizations combine their datasets for compute-intensive analysis without being able to access each other’s data. Examples include banks combining transactio...